The Humor Style Suitable for Leadership Positions

Throughout this report, the main topic in focus will be the Leader Humor Style. The definition of humor is not straightforward, “Over the years, researchers have been trying to arrive at one definition of humour which is both comprehensive and universal. All their efforts have met with little success due to the fact that humor is a highly complex and multifaceted phenomenon (Marı´n-Arrese, 2003). Therefore, the construct of humour, like emotion, does not readily lend itself to a single, generalized definition (Chapman & Foot, 1976). In one of the earliest attempts to conceptualize humour, Berger (1976) defines it as a unique type of communication that establishes an incongruent relationship or meaning and is presented in a manner that causes laughter.

Later on, Crawford (2003) defines humour as verbal and non-verbal communication which produces a positive cognitive or affective response from listeners.” The most recent definitions, “(Romero and Cruthirds (2006)) describe humour as amusing communications that produce positive emotions and cognitions in the individual, group, or organization, and Martin’s paper (2007) refers to humour as anything that people say or do that is perceived as funny and tends to make others laugh, the mental processes that go into both creating and perceiving such an amusing stimulus, and the affective response involved in the enjoyment of it.” Humor can be described as a multidimensional concept and can be classified as Healthy Humour comprised by the Affiliative and Self-Enhancing Humour or the Unhealthy Humour constituted by the Aggressive and Self-Defeating Humour. On one hand, Affiliative Humour refers to a “tendency to joke around in order to attract and amuse others aiming to enhance social interactions” (Martinet al., 2003). Self-Enhancing Humour acts mostly as a “coping mechanism, helping the person to sustain a humorous perspective of life even when faced with stress” (Martin et al., 2003).

On the other hand, Aggressive Humour is the “tendency to use humor for the purpose of manipulating, ridiculing, or criticizing others” (Martin, 2007). Self-Defeating Humour is used when “people ridicule themselves in an attempt to amuse and seek acceptance from others” (Martin et al., 2003). In the next stage, we will state and analyze our hypothesis in which we will relate several organizational behavior variables: Affiliative Humor & Emotional exhaustion (burnout) The word “burnout” was first used by an American psychologist to describe the result of high levels of stress and exhaustion. The most accepted definition of burnout was developed by Maslach and Jackson (1986) and includes three components: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. Emotional exhaustion is used to characterize weak emotional resources and lack of energy.

Depersonalization is described as the negative and cynical feelings of employees towards the clients. Finally, diminished personal accomplishment refers to the tendency to a negative self-assessment, workers are increasingly dissatisfied with their job achievements. The fact that people experience stress for long periods increases the likelihood of burnout, as well as a variety of other negative outcomes like work withdrawal and health problems, which will result (Talbot and Lumden, 2000). Studies have shown humor may reduce burnout by helping employees deal with difficult situations, release tension, regain perspective on their jobs, and facilitate an optimistic reinterpretation of events (Abel, 2002; Bischoff, 1990; Mesmer, 2000; Rosenberg, 1998; Talbot and Lumden, 2000). The results of Jessica Magnus and David Glew study “A meta-analysis of positive humor in the workplace”, reinforce the aforementioned statements as humor was found to relate in a negative way with burnout. Hypothesis 1 (H1): Affiliative Humor has a negative correlation with Emotional exhaustion (burnout).

Emotional exhaustion (burnout) & In-role performance Is widely recognized that employee performance is very important in burnout research (Shirom, 1989). In Maslach's research (1982) he hypothesized that the negative relationship between performance and burnout was “probably the bottom line for most institutions”. A study called “the contribution of burnout to work performance” conducted by Thomas Wright and Douglas Bonett seeks to prove this relation. In order to reach their results, they linked each component of the Maslach definition of burnout (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and diminished personal accomplishment) with performance to see how they were related. The stated hypothesis referred always a negative relationship to performance, and as predicted, the results showed that emotional exhaustion led to poor performance.

Hypothesis 2 (H2): Emotional exhaustion (burnout) has a negative correlation with in-role performance. Affiliative/Self-enhancing Humor & Identity leadership (ILI) “Use of humor at work by the leader helps enterprises and organizations grow and transform to enhance the overall performance of their organization” (Meyer, 1997). There are some positive outcomes that result from the use of humor, among them we find the reduction of the stress at work, the improvement of communication that allows a better understanding of the leader’s management style by the employees (Davis & Kliener, 1989; Ho et al., 2011). Furthermore, positive humor helps leaders to take new perspectives to approach different challenges (Koestler, 1964), and allows them to establish a good relationship with their employees while shortening the power distance between them (Li Ho, Ya Wang, Hung Huang, 2011), strengthening their leadership.

From the paper “Influence of humorous leadership at the workplace on the innovative behavior of leaders and their leadership effectiveness” we can also extract some interesting conclusions. In the first place, the study found that self-enhancing humor affects leadership positively using innovative behavior and that this kind of humor has an important influence on leadership performance. Besides that, it also states that positive humor helps managers to show their effective leadership and that is essential to firms using a proactive approach to be prosperous. Hypothesis 3 (H3): Affiliative/Self-enhancing Humor has a positive correlation with identity leadership. Identity leadership & In-role performance In-role performance is described as “the behavior directed toward formal tasks, duties, and responsibilities such as those included in job description”, (Williams & Anderson, 1991).

Nowadays, the most effective leaders are the ones that focus on relationships and that transmit to their employees a common purpose, which, in many cases, is not an easy task. Each leader has a different identity of leadership and there are several types in which they can be inserted in. The most famous kind of leadership is transformational, studies suggest that transformational leaders play an important role in the motivation and consequently in-role performance of employees (Liang-Chieh, 2011). Hypothesis 4 (H4): Identity leadership has a positive correlation with In-role performance. Affiliative Humor & Trust in the supervisor Research shows that “Humor can be used to communicate information or to make a point in a positive way (Ullian,1976), reduce the social distance between group members (Graham, 1995), facilitate higher levels of trust (Hampes, 1999), and assist in creating the group’s identity (Weick and Westley, 1996).”

Positive emotions shared among workers result in positivity spirals that promote improved coworker relationships, group member performance, and work satisfaction (Evans and Dion, 1991; Gully et al., 1995; Mullen and Copper, 1994), factors which are also known to relate to reduced work withdrawal and turnover (Podsakoff et al., 2007; Tett and Meyer, 1993). To reinforce the statements above, a more recent study performed by Alexander Pundt and Felicia Herrman (2015), showed that the affiliative humor was positively related with the identification with the leader and consequently with leader-member exchange (characterized by high levels of trust and respect).

Hypothesis 5 (H5): Affiliative humor has a positive correlation with Trust in the supervisor. Trust in the supervisor & In-role performance Trust plays an important role in an organization, it can be perceived as an integrative mechanism that creates and sustains social systems (Barber, 1983; Blau, 1964), and a source of higher efficiency and effectiveness (Zand, 1972; Culbert and McDonough, 1986; Golembiewski and McConkie, 1975). Moreover, in 2015, Tae-Yeol Kim, Deog-Ro Lee and Noel Yuen Wong developed a model that related positively supervisor humor to performance through trust in supervisor. The bottom line idea is that when employees have more trust in the supervisor their performance is better.

Hypothesis 6 (H6): Trust in the supervisor has a positive correlation with in-role performance. Boredom & Aggressive Humor Boredom can be described as ‘‘a state of relatively low arousal and dissatisfaction which is attributed to an inadequately stimulating environment’’ (Mikulas & Vodanovich, 1993, p. 3). Job boredom is a job property that induces boredom in people. Jobs with repetitive tasks that have low skill requirements are likely to be widely seen as boring (Melamed et al., 1995). Boredom proneness is related to individual differences in people’s probability of being bored in a given situation (Culp, 2006): A boredom-prone person lacks motivation and perceives routine tasks as requiring significant effort (Farmer & Sundberg, 1986). Hypothesis 7 (H7): Boredom has a positive correlation with humor aggressive or self-defeating.

Aggressive Humor & Performance. “Different from self-enhancing and affiliative humor, aggressive humor is maladaptive and detrimental to others (Kuiper et al. 2004; Martin et al. 2003). Although the supervisor may deliver it in a friendly manner, the aggressive humor of supervisors may create negative effects among subordinates, such as intimidation and embarrassment. As time passes, the unpleasant interaction becomes a stressor for the subordinates, which negatively influences their psychological well-being (U¨ nal 2014). Moreover, subordinates who work with supervisors using aggressive humor may avoid interacting with their supervisors, and thus may be reluctant to obtain necessary feedback and support from their supervisors to solve their job-related problems. The aggressive humor of supervisors, such as sarcasm and teasing, may also diminish the task-specific self-efficacy of subordinates, and thus deteriorating their job performance.” Hence, we predict: Hypothesis 8 (H8): The aggressive humor of supervisors has a negative correlation with performance.